Electric Press-Literary Insights Magazine. February 2022

Edition 3 Issue 5 February 2022

Life in the War Zone A collection of personal stories , based on true accounts.

From around the world by

Pa u l W h i t e

THIS IS NOT A ‘WAR’ STORY Life in the War Zone is a collection of poignant, eye-opening stories and articles, written primarily as fictional accounts, yet based on true experiences from major war zones around the globe. Each story and article is formed from interviews, discussions, reports and dialogues from those affected by conflict.

Life in the War Zone brings you the emotional truth about the effects and the long-lasting legacy of pain and suffering, to both combat troops and innocent civilian lives, devastated by war and armed conflict.

Revealed, are the cold hard facts; tales from the front line you probably do not want to consider. Situations you do not want to believe are true. Yet these things have happened, are still happening now.

For many, the fight continues long after the last shots of the battle have been fired. Physical trauma, disability and PTSD linger for years, even entire lifetimes, following conflict and struggle.

These are the sad facts of modern warfare

“In war, there are no unwounded ”

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E d i t or s We l com e Note Welcome to the first issue of Electric Press – Literary Insights magazine of 2022.

We have a packed edition for you this quarter, including an entertaining story, ‘Haunting Melody’ from the lovely Jane Ridson.

A feature on the prolific Scottish author Naomi Mitchison, who feature on our front cover, (a story with special interest for me).

A thought-provoking article regarding the push to ban certain books from schools, simply because some now regard them as ‘inappropriate for students’.

Following the educational theme, Literary Press looks at ways to help teach and coach children to read and comprehend.

We list some contranyms, to help you clearly identify which meaning is intended.

Tony McManus writes about lean, mean Thrillers.

We are entertained by Mathew Tekulsky, who kindly shares his short tale, The Alamo We show the latest Electric Eclectic book, Below Torrential Hill by Jonathan Koven, a winner of the Electric Eclectic Novella Fiction Prize 2021.

Revealed, who J R R Tolkien’s ‘real’ Beren and Luthien’ were in letters to his son, Christopher Tolkien.

This edition of Electric Press is packed with entertaining, informative and engaging content, along with a selection of books well worth getting stuck into.

Enjoy

Looking into the Abyss is a collection of short stories, brought to you by eleven authors from various areas of the world.

These authors joined together to help raise awareness, and encourage support, of the most critical wildlife protection and conservation efforts, like the ongoing fight against the illegal poaching of Rhinoceros horn.

By owning a copy of Looking into the Abyss you are helping to spread the word about these magnificent creatures and helping to ensure the Rhinoceros continue to walk the earth for future generations.

Not only will Looking into the Abyss give you an array of wonderful and varied stories to enjoy, but it also lends the satisfaction that you are helping the world and its wildlife survive.

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Con ten t s PAGE 7 Echoes of Fahrenheit 451 - ‘They’ want to ban books.

PAGE 11 My thoughts about Reading Björn Schießle.

PAGE 15 Haunting Melody A short story by Jane Risdon.

PAGE 21 In praise of lean mean thrillers, Tony McManus.

PAGE 29 The Pandemic and its effects on reading habits.

PAGE 33 This Months Cover Feature - Naomi Mitchison.

PAGE 39 The Alamo A Short Story by Mathew Tekulsky

PAGE 51 My last wish a poem by Anon

PAGE 53 The Power of Reading on Children

PAGE 56 When France banned books

PAGE 59 Letters to Christopher Tolkien

PAGE 65 A Life in a Day, A short story from Chris A Hunt

A woman is dead, and another is missing. The only person who can save her is Cassie.

With no clues and time running out, her brother, Detective Newbold, desperately needs her help.

He is counting on Cassie’s clairvoyant and empathic abilities to locate Chantelle.

When Chantelle’s brother, Pedro, seeks out a psychic for help, he meets and falls for Cassie.

Though he wants answers, neither Cassie nor Detective Newbold can give any, which complicates their relationship. To make matters worse, his overbearing mother adds further damage with her meddling.

Meanwhile, the killer has been caught, but he refuses to talk. Now, it’s up to Cassie to read the signs and rescue her lover’s sister.

Will she find the answers in time?

My feet moved along the trail, stepping in the victim’s footsteps. It wasn’t long before I shuddered to a halt. This was where her enjoyment had turned to fear.

My heart thumped as my breath grew jagged. Blood rushed through my veins as Mandy’s fear bubbled under the surface and a sob rose in my throat. It was her cry and her terror that mounted inside me. It caused me

to flee as my “fight or flight” instincts kicked in.

He was chasing us.

Her feet became mine as we moved together towards the trees. Entering a pathway surrounded by woodland, I knew beyond a doubt this was where he had grabbed her. My panic rose, and I moved quickly. The action made me lose my footing slightly and caused me to turn my head just as a shadow leapt at me...

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Echoes of

Fahrenheit 451 ‘They’ want to ban books

Students and teachers may be encountering limited access to content.

The list of most challenged books in the past decade include: The Glass Castle by Jennette Walls, banned for offensive language and sexually explicit content.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, cited as being insensitive, antifamily and violent.

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin, challenged for its LGBTQIA content and the perceived effects on young people.

This has an uncanny resemblance to Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, which is set in a dystopian society that burns books to “control dangerous ideas and unhappy concepts,” according to the government’s political agenda of control over the population.

Efforts to ban books are taking a broader view of limiting

access.

Objectors say books like Beloved by Toni Morrison, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, should not be discussed or available in schools.

Recently, Open Library [https://openlibrary.org] created a collection

of

books

removed

from

circulation.

This

collection includes: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and Fences by August Wilson, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1987, along with Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Open Library’s lead community librarian, Lisa Seaberg, is curating a collection of 850 books that have recently been challenged. Among the books targeted are ones that mention human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, contain

material

that

might

make

students

feel

uncomfortable or distressed because of their race, or sex,

or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive.

What has become caught in this “wide net,” said Seaberg, “are books about health education, teen pregnancy, civics, philosophy, encyclopaedias

religion, and,

anthropology,

ironically,

a

novel

inventions, about

book

censorship in a high school.”

“One reason books get banned is because political forces

within an area become stronger than the populace,” said Mek, who leads the Open Library team for the Internet Archive.

“Open Library is trying to bridge these inequity gaps across geographies and social classes. We invite the populace to come together and participate in a digital sanctuary where our rich and diverse cultural heritage isn’t subject to censorship by the few with special interests. There’s a

difference between sharing an opinion and robbing someone of the opportunity to form their own.”

“At the most basic level, banning books is about restricting access to knowledge,” said Lisa Petrides, chief executive officer and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.

“The impact of this on schools means students are exposed to a limited set of world views, which is extremely detrimental to critical thinking, reflective analysis and discussion,” said Petrides. “Perhaps even more importantly, as we are seeing today, this means educators and librarians are increasingly put in difficult situations, having to face the

threat of reprisal from administrators or school boards, who are themselves increasingly less willing to stand up for the rights of their teachers and learners.”

“A library must offer diverse materials so people can draw their own conclusions,” said Mek. He embraces the oft-cited quote from librarian Jo Godwin: “A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”

To change hearts and minds, write a compelling Book, don’t take authors you disagree with off the shelves.

Seaberg says, “Hopefully, recent book challenges will ultimately fail, and access to the whole range of books will be restored. “If students walk into a library and they have books which only present one side of an issue, or are only relatable to a certain group in a culture, it excludes a lot of people,” she says. “They might not even know other content exists.”

A hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not -toodistant future The classic novel of a post-literate future, 'Fahrenheit 451' stands alongside Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World' as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which over fifty years from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.

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I n t r i c at e

We live in a masterpiece An absolute work of art, Beauty is everywhere Embedded In the Universes heart.

From the gravitation of the stars And the vibration of tunes Love is everywhere Thanks to the Suns & Moons.

It’s a dance of frequencies A painting with every colour, With shines, glimmers and twinkles.

It’s a creativity like no other.

There’s a magic within Energy is all around, From the atoms and cells To the dust on the ground.

Life is a blueprint of love Every speck holds its secret

Whispering into the ethers, Listen close, can you hear it?

The spiral of life deepens With the sacred geometry, An art piece without an end An art piece of infinite quality.

The universes unique architecture In which everything aligns From the detail of a snowflake

To a stars design.

We live in a fairytale A true masterpiece of art, Originally published on 01 Jan 2022 by

From the life you experience To what you feel in your heart.

The Darkest Fairytale

As child we observed Through innocent eyes, Believe in the wonder again True love never dies.

K

https:// thedarkestfairytale.wordpress.com/2022/ 01/13/intricate/

My thoughts a b ou t R e a d i n g

When I was a child, I became interested in reading books on such subjects as politics, science, and the world because all these topics where present in my home.

Every morning a newspaper arrived, and was placed on the table, accessible for everyone. Each month, additional magazines my parents subscribed too arrived, and if I walked into the home office, I found shelves of books on various matters.

This how I began reading the newspaper, the magazines got me interested in a

variety of topics, and started to read books to understand more.

I wonder, have we lost this natural way of discovering things these days?

Now my daily newspaper is an online subscription, which I read on my smartphone, or tablet. The same is true for magazines. Regarding books, more and more books are eBooks, which only exists in my reader, or as ebub file in a folder of my computer. They are invisible to everyone beside me.

They are digital ghosts, electronic binary phantoms, only observable through modern gadgetry.

Regarding the books, I have to admit, even for me, it is hard to keep an overview of what exists in my eBook library, and it is way harder to discover stuff than it is standing in front of a bookshelf, grabbing one, opening it, flicking through some random pages, reading a few sentences, picking up the next one, and so on, until something grabs you, a magical sentence, a single word… then hours later you look up and realise its dark, the day has gone, and you are hungry.

I wonder what this change means for our children? How will they discover all the amazing and interesting things I did? How will they become interested in news, science, the world, and reading in general?

Björn Schießle

Stone Cold is a supernatural thriller

of

possession,

gruesome

murders,

and

a

whole lot of fun.

The book tells of when Billy invites her friends from school, and is accused of spreading malicious gossip. Ending with her life being threatened, by

having a knife held to her throat, This

scene,

the

one

an

editor once told me was too

far-fetched,

happened.

That Billy was me.

Victims may forget... in time, but often something triggers them and every memory they shut away hits full force.

Those recollections of running for their life, hearing those behind them get closer… the recall of hiding in the toilets, hoping the bullies won’t find them… the scene where they are helping a teacher set out equipment ready for her next class, just so they can avoid entering the playground… With every trigger those scenes now feel as though they

happened yesterday.

Depression and nightmares at the age of thirty because of being mentally bullied and cyber bullied by people she thought of as friends. Every nasty, hurtful word that was hurled at her, every punch, or kick received, hits back full force.

Nothing is ever really forgotten.

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STO N E C O L D from

Karina Kantas

If being bullied through every school Billy went to was not enough, being attacked in her own home pushed her

over the edge.

Severely depressed and suicidal, Billy takes matters into her own hands and sees a counsellor. After just one session, she is now on her way to Scotland, as a volunteer to help the professor of Edinburgh university dig, and clean up

an

archaeological

site

that

has

recently

been

discovered.

Although she tries to shy away from the others, not wanting them to find a reason to dislike her, she is

instantly accepted as one of them. Without realizing whats happening, she becomes closer to Shane, a motocross enthusiast who has taken her under his wing.

While working at the site, Billy comes across an unusual stone. She takes it to the professor to be examined, but he dismisses it as a pendant, probably dropped by a hiker. He threads the stone with onto black leather cord and gives it back to Billy.

After which, the peace they had, the friendships they all formed, gets tested as bodies start to pile up.

Billy’s full name is Belinda Chandis. She is 16 years old, just finished school exams, and is thinking about applying to college.

But

she

is

severely

depressed

and

even

contemplating suicide. Billy’s been bullied physically and mentally through most of her schooling and finds it hard to trust anyone. She is shy, and does not like being the centre of attention.

Light and Dark Darkness surrounds me.

I no longer see the light.

Voices taunt, and words slice viciously.

Whispers spoken, rumours released.

Those that were friends become enemies.

Name forgotten, respect is lost.

The war begins. None to fight for me.

Head down, eyes diverted.

Afraid to speak, afraid to look.

Rage and hurt blankets my smile.

While the knife impales me deeper.

When all seems lost and black.

She enters bringing sunshine and hope.

Embraced in her soft warmth.

My soul lightens.

Tomorrow I will face another day of torture with words.

But knowing she is waiting for me.

With a smile of love.

The tunnel with light remains.

Light and dark take from Karin’s poetry and flash fiction collection, Undressed Available in Paperback and e-book

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Karina Kantas Is an award-winning author, and filmmaker, Podcaster, YouTuber, BookTuber, Radio Host, and Entrepreneur.

Karina writes in many fictional genres, enjoying pushing new genres to the limits.

You can find her on the majority of social media platforms, where she is happy to talk to other authors and her readers.

https://www.amazon.com/Karina-Kantas/e/ B0034P98EW?

Haunting Melody A short story by

Jane Risdon

Sitting bolt upright in bed Spike listened hard. There it was again; a thin airy melody drifting just above the sound of the storm outside. He concentrated hard trying to pin-point where it was coming from this time. A few weeks ago, when another storm hit, he’d heard the same melody playing in the library of his ancient cottage, but when he’d entered the room, the sound had gone. He’d put it down to his imagination. Now he wasn’t too sure. He was getting scared; it seemed as if the melody was in the room all around him, stronger, seeping into his very being.

He shivered. Surely someone was in the room. Dread creeping over his now sweating body, his eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness, and yes, in the corner he could swear he saw… something.

Gripped by increasing terror he found himself

paralysed as — whatever it was — moved closer to him. The tune getting louder and louder almost bursting his eardrums. Feeling the weight of something pushing him down on the bed Spike fell

into darkness, unable to breath. ***** Ever since Lethal Legacy’s tour bus crashed two months ago killing their lead guitarist Ace — bringing him into the band as his temporary replacement — Spike had been hearing the riff the musician had apparently been playing when the bus went off the road as they headed up Big Bear Mountain in the snow. Ace had been sitting in the back lounge working on a new tune he’d come up with a few days before, when their driver lost control

on a bend and narrowly missed plunging over the side into a ravine. As the driver fought to right the bus it spun

round and was hit end on by an enormous truck heading down the mountain far too fast. The guitarist was thrown through the rear window breaking his neck as he hit the side of the mountain head on. No-one else was badly hurt, just cuts and bruises. They were lucky.

The band was devastated, even more so when their record company insisted the tour must go on and Spike would finish the tour in Ace’s place. It hadn’t gone down well, but

the band hadn’t any choice. He knew he was the last person they wanted; there was bad blood. The guitarist had ‘stolen’ Ace’s girlfriend, Carrie, months before. He could tell they were barely keeping it together with him taking their beloved member’s place. At Ace’s funeral they’d played the new song he’d been working on. A feeling of dread crawled through Spike when he’d heard it.

He couldn’t fathom why, but he felt doom was upon him.

Touring Europe, an uneasy truce settled upon the

musicians as they travelled from gig to gig, country to country. The fans were hostile to Spike at first, but soon accepted that he was an amazing guitarist, better than Ace in fact, though no-one dared say so within the band’s hearing. There was record company talk of making him permanent. He wasn’t too keen though the money was good. His own band folded due to artistic differences earlier in the year, and apart from temping on sessions and tours, he hadn’t found a band he wanted to join

although he’d been asked plenty of times, but now his personal manager was losing his patience; he had to eat too.

It was in England when the melodies first began, in Spike’s ancient cottage where he stayed whenever in Europe. He’d first heard it in the grounds late one windy night when he couldn’t sleep and was walking along the edge of the wood adjoining his land, bracing against the wind which preceded the storm brewing high above his head. He felt exhilarated and stopped to enjoy the moment, thinking of

Carrie who was joining him soon, trying not to think of her ex. Just audible above the noise of the bending and

rustling trees, he heard music. It grew louder, more familiar. Rooted to the spot, unable to move his legs, he felt — rather than saw — a shape moving towards him from the depths of the wood. He couldn’t breathe, his chest was being crushed under a great force and just before the blackness enveloped him, he thought he saw a guitar.

Carrie dismissed his fears as nonsense, his collapse was due to stress and exhaustion nothing more. Ace was dead

and gone. Anyway, it’d been her prerogative to leave him.

Sure, he’d been cut-up about it and made threats, ‘If I can’t have you, no-one will,’ and similar nonsense. Carrie didn’t take it seriously. ‘He’ll get over it,’ she told her new lover, who’d felt bad about the break-up; but he wasn’t so sure.

Soon after the break-up Ace had been killed.

A week passed and Spike felt his girlfriend had been right.

He’d been over-tired following the gruelling tour. He began to relax, to enjoy being back in England.

Concentrating, picking out a riff on his favourite guitar in his studio late at night, recording and replaying it, the guitarist was relaxed and happy. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes, thinking about the new tune when, without hitting playback, music began to fill the monitors above the recording desk. Spike froze momentarily. It wasn’t his riff playing back. Almost dropping his guitar in the rush to stop the track he hit the button, but it kept

playing. The melody got louder, the faders on the desk raced up and down of their own accord, the monitors shook fit to burst as the console lights and the studio lights flickered and died. Spike felt himself sinking to the floor in the darkness, his chest constricted by an unseen weight, his breath forced from his lungs. His eyes opened briefly registering a familiar shape looming over him before blackness engulfed him.

With each reoccurring blackout Spike’s recovery became

slower, leaving a lingering feeling of ‘strangeness’ within

himself, which he couldn’t explain. A sense of dread, of looming…what? Doom? Yes. Doom pervaded his very being. The musician felt out of control, driven by something deep within himself. He often found himself humming Ace’s riff, thinking of him constantly. The guitarist’s face was imbedded in his mind’s eye throughout the day, seductive yet repulsive, almost taunting him. Once, when he was shaving, he found himself staring at Ace’s face in the mirror, confused as to how he seemed to be shaving the dead man’s face.

At night, in the darkness, he felt Ace’s presence looming over him, brooding, patiently waiting — for what? Even Carrie was becoming distant, sometimes moody, other times preoccupied; their relationship seemed to be changing. He often found her humming Ace’s tune, her eyes burning fiercely with an intensity she never had for him, he realised. She was bound to feel conflicted, Spike decided. She’d lost her long-time former boyfriend tragically; she was bound to still feel something. But…

Spike dreaded storms, especially at night. He pushed himself under the covers like a small child who believed that if there was anything ‘creepy’ in the room it could be kept at bay by hiding under the covers. He kept all this to himself – not that she seemed to notice anything – and tried hard to get on with writing new material, but every time he recorded his efforts, Ace’s riff would fill the speakers. He’d even found himself picking out the

melody on his own guitar absent-mindedly.

The guitarist woke. He sat up rubbing his eyes, focusing.

Where was he? Perhaps he’d been on a bender with the band and blagged a bed for the night with a fan, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t recall anything like that. Oh well, he’d soon remember. He felt invigorated, more vital than he’d felt in ages. Stepping out of bed he noticed his guitar leaning against the wall, which was odd. Why would he have it with him in a strange bedroom? He

picked it up and began to strum it. The door opened and

Carrie entered carrying coffee, with a huge smile on her

face.

‘I wondered when you’d wake up. You’ve been asleep for ages, way past lunchtime.’ She put the coffee on the bedside table and sat on the bed. ‘I love that tune.’

The guitarist smiled and continued to play. ‘I love it too,’ he said. ‘That’s why I wrote it for you.’ He put the guitar down. ‘Where are we? I don’t remember this place.’ He sipped his coffee.

She smiled dreamily. ‘Where we belong.’

‘I must’ve been exhausted, don’t know why.’ He yawned.

‘Guess I needed the rest. I feel fantastic, like a new man.’

The tune filled the room, surrounding them both. He blew her a kiss. She caught it in her hand and blew it back.

Carrie walked over to the window and looked out at the clear blue sky, and the sunshine bathing the garden. ‘I’m so glad the storm has finally passed,’ she said as the guitarist put his arms around her waist, nuzzling her neck. ‘The Spring has come at last.’ She turned and held his face in her hands as she kissed him.

‘I love this time of the year.’ He said, gazing down upon the garden, all thoughts of unfamiliarity gone. Somehow, he knew he was where he belonged. ‘New beginnings.’

Her eyes danced mischievously. ‘So, what do you want to do with the rest of your life, Ace?’ The End

Jane Risdon began writing following her successful career in the International Music Industry.

Jane is currently working on a series of novels called 'Ms. Birdsong Investigates' centered around a glamorous ex MI5 Officer forced into early retirement, who is trying to keep a low profile in a rural village in Oxfordshire.

Only One Woman https://amzn.to/3zCwGpR Undercover Crime Shorts https://amzn.to/3n7FHls

CQ Magazine said...

"Dark Words is the literary equivalent of listening to Leonard Cohen, wonderfully soothing for the soul."

Dark days come to us all at some time in our lives but they are not the place for us to dwell for too long.

They are not our home.

https://amzn.to/3fDXzAm Dark words, a collection of dark tales and darker poetry.

The tales relate to the turmoil of life; told from unexpected aspects and approached from oblique angles. Some from childhood, others from illness and psychological disturbance.

Nostalgic remising, running from love or welcoming death, each is an emotional rollercoaster.

The poetry delves deeper into the soul, touching your heart with tendrils of association; there, by the grace of God, go you.

Love, fear, compassion, self-harm and hate are all explored, without boundary. Each word reaching into your mind with bony fingers, scratching the dust from those very secrets you have buried in the black shadowy hollows of your memory, never intending them to be exposed again.

Dark Words uncovers all you are, all you have hidden from yourself. It knows you, your secrets and your inner soul.

It is an exhumation of your being, of your truth.

It is one book you really should read.

Paperback only.

IN PRAISE OF LEAN, MEAN THRILLERS an article by

To n y M c M a n u s Remember them? Those small, slim paperbacks your father and grandfather used to read.

Novels with titles like, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and Farewell, My Lovely.

True page-turners they were, ones that punched their weight and usually got the job done in less than 250 paperback pages from the pens of such writers as, James Hadley Chase, Earl Stanley Gardner, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammet, Mickey Spillane, and the one and only, Raymond Chandler.

These were hard-boiled thrillers, Americans called ‘pocketbooks.

Novels which slipped easily into the inside pocket of your jacket, ready to be read on your journey.

These were the books and writers who started it all What happened to them? What happened to those lean, mean thrillers of yesteryear?

The good news is many are still in print. And most are now available in digital form on the internet. And you can find old copies when you go treasure hunting in used bookstores. Quite a number of them are lying on my bookshelf.

The bad news is, the writers are dead and gone, passed away.

Another Raymond Chandler novel will never be written. The torch has been passed. New eras have begun.

Apart from anything else, modern thrillers have put on

considerable weight. Like the human race, crime novels are getting obese. Mean they may be but lean no more.

And it’s not just the thrillers. The increasing flab seems endemic across the genres and even infects the ‘literary’, prize seeking, works. It’s especially evident in biographies.

Visit your local bookstore and look at the big, fat fiction books on the shelves. Look at the thickness of the spines, and ask yourself, as I do, what happened to brevity? Well, on the evidence it appears it’s no longer the soul of wit; it’s

definitely out of favour. Wordiness is much in vogue.

Why is this? I don’t know. How? Let’s try to find out.

But before going further, let us concede that, as in everything, there are exceptions: Classics

such as

Middlemarch and War and Peace, immediately spring to mind, along with The Brothers Karamazov, Vanity Fair,

Time and the River and many other works. And from more contemporary fair, James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, and the wonderful Shogun, James Clavell’s 1100 page masterpiece, the reading of which occupied my summer of 1974. And there are other excellent big novels that without doubt punched every bit of their weight.

So, I did a little checking. I took down some old books, lean mean thrillers all. Ian Fleming’s From Russia, With Love, and Diamonds are Forever, Raymond Chandler’s The Big

Sleep and The High Window, Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, and Double Indemnity by James M. Cain. I paced these head-to-head beside newer works and made comparisons.

Printed in 1974, my copy of Ian Fleming’s From Russia, With Love is 41/2” x 7”. The novel’s word count is 77,865.

It’s slim and fits easily in the jacket pocket.

Printed by Amazon in 2017, my own novel, The Sum of Things has a word count of 84,456. But, as Amazon

doesn’t print 41/2” x 7” books, it is in 5” x 8” format. It’s

longer, wider, and it’s a lot thicker than the Fleming book and won’t fit in your jacket pocket.

Fleming’s novel has 42 lines of text per page and is 208 pages long. My novel has 31 lines of text per page and is 385 pages in length. The font is larger and the space between the lines increased. They’ve increased the white space. They’ve also increased the page thickness. What about the writing?

Thickening the paper, raising the font size, and increasing

the line spacing will only give you so much. To really bulk up, one needs the writer’s involvement. Writers willing to overwrite and pad out their works, and editors who either don’t care or are more than willing to push authors into doing so.

I then compared the lean prose of the older books with David Balducci’s thrillers, Absolute Power, and Total Control. I must say that I enjoyed both those novels, though I felt at the time they were more than a little

overweight. Absolute Power weighs in at 704 pages and 214,720 words. Total Control yields a whopping 720 pages 219,600 words. A sample of nine David Balducci stand-alone novels gives a mean average page length of 564 and a word count of 172,115 words. Big fat books indeed. Overwritten? I’d say so.

Scott Turow is a writer/lawyer of legal thrillers. His novels are notable for their courtroom duels of impressive drama. I enjoyed his first book Presumed Innocent

immensely. I also liked his second novel, The Burden of Proof. He’s a fine author who knows his legal stuff and so he writes with skill about what he knows. But he overwrites. For him, I came up with an average of 477 pages and 141,615 words. Though the book was recommended to me, one of the things that put me off reading his novel The Laws of Our Fathers was the sheer size of it; 534 pages and 212,860 words.

It’s worth mentioning that Turow is a strong admirer the British writer, Graham Greene. Turow writes that Greene

is the writer he long aspired to be. He feels that Greene’s

novel, The Power and The Glory, is a novel he can’t live without. I read this book at school, and I also became a Graham Greene fan. The Power and The Glory delivers the goods in 190 pages and 78,445 words. Lean and clean.

Tom Clancy was a high-tech windbag who overwrote and even padded out his work. I only read one of his, The Hunt for Red October. I saw the movie first then read the novel and enjoyed both. However, I felt the book at 656 pages and 200.080 words was seriously overblown.

Overwriting is not the province of bad writers. Some of the greatest writers have tended to do it. For many writers it comes with the territory; it’s natural, they can’t help it. It’s a chance to show off. Thomas Wolfe was such writer. The famed editor Maxwell Perkins fought hard with that brilliant and difficult man, and against the odds convinced Wolfe to cut 90,000 words from his epic, Look Homeward Angel, and in so doing, showed the importance of good editing.

Other writers reveal a keener affinity with brevity.

John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, launched his career and is in my view the finest spy thriller ever written. It’s done in 240 pages and 60,900 words.

That chilling and, unforgettable novel, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, delivers the goods in 180 pages and 58,145 words.

The mean average for Raymond Chandler’s seven novels yields 268 pages and 80,580 words.

James M. Cain’s thriller, Double Indemnity: 115 pages 35,075 words; a novella.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: 217 pages 62,205words.

In classic thrillers, Stevenson’s Treasure Island takes just 156 pages and 47, 580 words.

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, 140 pages

and 53,940 words.

And though not a thriller, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a brilliant fast read at 180 pages and 54,900 words.

But, one may ask, if the overwriting is well done, should we mind? Well, since word inflation and padding run counter to the writer’s golden rule: Make Every Word Count, I feel we should mind. And that’s where editors come in. Or should come in.

So what happened to editing?

I recently read a handful of thrillers authored by Lee Child.

Child is a heavy hitter, scoring over 70,000,000 sales worldwide. Seeking a new thriller writing experience, I got into him. I have to say I was expecting a new Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler. What I got was a shock. I was appalled at the banality of it. (Check my blog, ‘Good Writing, Bad Writing and Market Forces’). Apart from

anything else, Child seriously overwrites and, in a crude, clumsy way. He is on record as saying that his publishing house editors are reluctant to show him their notes.

“They’re afraid to piss me off,” he said. That should not be the case.

To my mind, publishing house editors have become little more than cyphers today, employees who punch a timeclock, put in a shift and do as they’re told. And as today’s authors use word processors and online editing

software, manuscripts should arrive on editor’s desks in a pretty clean state. So, armed with modern computer tools, copy editing seems to be little more than a walk in the park. The more thorough, substantive, or comprehensive editing seems to be a thing of the past. It’s timeconsuming and expensive. It demands greater effort, more involvement. It requires imagination. Publishing houses today possibly feel it’s a luxury they can’t afford. But it’s substantive editing that cuts most of the flab.

The days of Maxwell Perkins are over. He was the editor

who discovered and nurtured. F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was under his disciplined guidance that Fitzgerald gave us The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Through Fitzgerald, Perkins met and worked with Ernest Hemingway and together they made history. Hemingway honored him by dedicating his Nobel Prize-winning novella, The Old Man and the Sea to Max Perkins. Perkins discovered James Jones and that association resulted in the novel, From Here to Eternity, and made Jones rich and famous. Such editors function as a writer’s coach and guide, teammate and even friend. And it must be every writer’s dream to find such an editor.

But this becomes irrelevant if publishers decide that it’s big thick books they want. They call the shots. Remember this.

When you buy a book, you naturally feel it’s the author’s creation; it’s not. It’s a publishing house product. It may be that the author doesn’t like the title. He or she may not like the cover artwork. The same goes for its bulk. The big books are a marketing ploy, editorial considerations are cast aside.

I’ve concluded that the ‘fat book’ syndrome commenced in America. And I find it rather apt that publishers in the land of big servings of fast food should believe, and encourage the public, that bigger is better. I gather they like to see their big shiny hardbacks in the windows and on the display tables of high-end bookshops. I once read that Ian Fleming would have difficulty getting published today on account of his lean, come to the point style. Today he’d be more or less

forced to inflate. And so it goes. But do we need these crimes against brevity? Do we need massive doorstoppers like Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants? I don’t believe we do.

On a personal note, my novel, A Bangkok Interlude is written in the style of those lean mean crime novels and delivers the goods in around 70,000 words. And in Mike Villiers, it introduces a fine protagonist.

You’ll enjoy it.

https://amzn.to/3r3W1F9

Tony McManus was born in Manchester, England.

He resides in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

He can be found at:

http://downeastern.wix.com/tonymcmanuswriter Or via his email:

downeastern@hotmail.com

UP FOR IT

by Tony McManus Another great read from a master of action

thrillers This is a fast-paced tale, which I read in a couple of days (three-quarters of it in one sitting!). It’s one of those books you shouldn’t start if you expect to get to bed early, as the rhythm and flow of events will have you turning pages late into the night.

The descriptions, especially of the multiple action scenes, place the reader alongside Fallon as he puts is special forces skills to work.

A thoroughly enjoyable read from a master of the action thriller genre, highly recommended for fans of Andy McNab and Chris Ryan.

Eric J. Gates.

https://amzn.to/31NiyO4

Deep Waters

is a heart-wrenching story of one man's fight to come to terms

with his wife's death.

Romantically touching and emotional, this tale allows privileged insight into Gary's mind as he stumbles onward through life, and unveils an understanding of why he chose this island to execute his last wishes.

CQ magazine says, "Paul White uses his protagonist, Gary, as a device to explore the depths and fragility of the human psyche. Like us, we doubt if you can read this book without shedding a tear, or two…"

An Electric Eclectic Pocketbook—Paperback & eBook from Amazon

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The Pandemic and its effects on reading habits an Electric Press report Many of us turned to books for comfort, distraction, and escape in a tremendously upsetting year.

The result? Print book sales had their best year in a decade, according to NPD BookScan.

BookScan, which tracks sales of physical books, reported that unit sales rose 8.2 per cent, with juvenile fiction leading the way. eBook sales increased, reversing a long decline, according to the Association of American Publishers.

And people relied more on audiobooks, too. Downloads of audiobooks in 2020 rose 16.5 per cent compared with 2019, the AAP said.

Looking through the best-seller lists, our reading tastes were greatly influenced by the news.

People flocked to books related to the pandemic and the body, including John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza” https://amzn.to/3zWEwe6 and James Nestor’s “Breath” https://amzn.to/3GuAjRg

The pandemic changed a lot about how we lived in the past couple of years; how we shop, how we socialize, how we work. It also influenced our reading habits.

Marcello Giovanelli, the senior lecturer at Aston University in Birmingham, England, has been one of the researchers on the Lockdown Library Project, which investigated people's reading habits during the first pandemic lockdown in the U.K. About 860 people answered the call on social media to take part in an online survey conducted by Giovanelli and his colleagues between July 1 and Aug. 31, 2020.

Although the full survey results are still being processed, the researchers can already draw some conclusions; they found that around two-thirds of respondents said they had read more during that first lockdown.

"Lots of people spoke of books as old friends," Giovanelli said, describing reading as ‘sort of therapeutic,’ a space where they could safely escape. His research also found respondents said they gravitated toward novels.

"If what's happening in the real world isn't particularly pleasant, that can be extra enjoyable," he said. "If you've got the time to do it, of course."

That has been another challenge. While some thought they would have more time to

read, one-third of people who responded to Giovanelli's survey reported reading less.

Many people said it was because they were no longer commuting to work, and the lack of train or bus rides meant less time to just sit and read.

Kids pulled out of school and needing home-schooling attention was another time sap.

Natasha Rajah, a psychiatry professor at McGill University, says it was about feeling like her brain could not handle reading. She studies the cognitive neuroscience of memory, so understands why it is difficult in times like this to be able to stay focused enough to read.

Natasha says the combination of increased stress and anxiety from the pandemic, plus working from home with more distractions, means it is more difficult for us to filter out the unimportant noise and concentrate.

"And to kind of build that narrative in your mind, you're relying on working memory, and you're also relying on the ability to access what we call semantic memory — your world knowledge, you know, your knowledge about what certain contexts evoke in you."

In other words, where following a story in your mind was once effortless and joyful, it

has now become a challenge.

The good news, Rajah says, is that if you were an avid reader before the pandemic but have found it difficult to read lately, do not worry. The brain recovers.

"The brain is very plastic, and you know, these are not lesions or … permanent changes in brain function. Our brain is learning, and it is adapting I believe in the resilience of the human brain. So, I think we'll come out of this fine."

The stories in this wonderfully entertaining book

have a feminine

association, as do the story's individual focus, whether direct or implicit.

Each story explores the depths of human character, the quintessence disposition of living and of life itself.

Many ask questions we often shy from, the ones we are afraid to ask ourselves are unearthed, revealed and brought screaming into the daylight of recognition.

The prevailing factor is, they are written with consideration for our fragile human disposition, the fears, the dreams and wishes, the uncertainties and self-doubts we all carry inside ourselves, the human element of love, of life, of hope and survival.

This is a collection of poignant, emotive, yet entertaining stories, stories which will remain with you forever.

Paperback only, Amazon

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This Months Cover Feature

N aom i M i tc h i s on Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, Baroness Mitchison CBE (née Haldane) was a Scottish novelist and

poet.

Often called a doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over ninety books of historical genus, science fiction, travel writing, and autobiography.

Naomi Mitchison was born into privilege; Her father was John Scott Haldane (of Cloan), CH, FRS. Her uncle, Lord Haldane, was Lord Chancellor in the first Labour government (1924). Her brother was the late Prof J B S Haldane.

Naomi was a socialist with, between the wars, a sympathy for communism, a free spirit with a sense of duty and obligation, a laird who worked her own land, author of almost as many books as she

lived years, a loving wife to Labour MP Dick Mitchison, but one who enjoyed an open marriage, a county councilor in Argyll who worked devotedly for the Highlands, a tribal mother in Botswana for whose people she worked with equal devotion, a democrat and an aristocrat, one who always dressed for dinner.

Much of Naomi’s young life was spent at Oxford, where she attended the Dragon School. In 1916, she married old Etonian Gilbert Mitchison while he was on a week's leave from the battlefields of Flanders, where he was later wounded, suffering a

fractured skull with after-effects which took a long while to heal.

He was from a well-off family, but after the war he made his way as

a young barrister, although success did not happen

quickly.

From the late 1930s, she kept a diary for the Mass Observation organisation. Naomi starred in a movie for the short-lived Socialist Film Council, ‘The Road to Hell’ (1933), playing a desperate working-class wife rebuffed by a bored Public Assistance Board.

She raised five children; there were six, but a muchloved son died of meningitis in 1927, leaving a painful, emotional scar. https://player.bfi.org.uk/

free/film/watch-the-road-to-hell-1933-online The Mitchison house at Hammersmith was famous for its parties in happy or anxious times. The guest lists covered the widest spectrum; the Huxleys, Wyndham Lewis, the Coles, Postgates, Laskis, John Scott

Stracheys, E M Forster, A P Herbert, Gertrude

Viscount Haldane

Hermes; and always there were the unknown proteges, refugees and strange lost foreigners from all over the world.

Generously hospitable, their home at Carradale in Argyll gathered in all kinds of waifs and strays among the famous and unreproached scroungers; and then the Mitchison grandchildren and greatgrandchildren joined the mix. Naomi's wartime diary, Among You Taking Notes... (1985), is a vivid description of that period, and of her own pivotal role in it.

Fortunately, incomparable

Naomi gift

was of

blessed

concentration,

with

an

and

an

explosive energy for writing. The typewriter on her desk in the crowded drawing-room at Carradale was always uncovered, and she would work there Carradale House

busily while the guests played Scrabble, strummed guitars, and as fisherman came about the salmon, a ghillie to consult about skinning a deer, or just somebody asking what was for supper.

She was able to write anywhere, which helped

because, as a compulsive traveler, she could continue

writing on planes or in trains. She travelled to the US in the 1930s, with concerns for the sharecroppers; to Vienna in 1934 when the Nazi-era storm clouds gathered, and smuggled letters from endangered people to Switzerland, in her knickers.

In one of her autobiographical books, Mucking Around (1981), https://amzn.to/3JARum1 Naomi describes her haphazard travels in five continents, over 50 years. In 1952, she went to Moscow as a member of the Authors'

World Peace Appeal. She went regularly to Africa, especially to Botswana, where she was made a sort of tribal mother to the Bakgatla people and helped them practically. Wherever she was in the world, she seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the country and people around her, this is reflected in her writing about these varied places.

Naomi was never sure how many books she had written.

She often said it was about 70. The articles were

uncountable, from book reviews for the old Time and Tide magazine and the New Statesman, to practical essays on farming,

campaigning

articles,

recollections,

and

reflections. The books were varied in style and subject, from

the

somewhat

autobiographical

disorderly

volumes

to

candour

carefully

of

her

researched

historical novels set in Celtic, Hellenic or Byzantine times.

The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) was a best seller, in which her mystical intellect sloughed away the

centuries. https://amzn.to/3FhVnJv There was a book on Socrates, written with R H S Crossman; poems (The Cleansing of the Knife, 1979); and Oil for the Highlands? (1974). Life was not all gadding about the world. She cared deeply about the problems of Scotland and served on the Argyll County Council and on the Highlands and Islands Development Council. She was made a CBE in 1985. But all this was not enough. She was a serious botanist and gardener and a practical farmer.

Then there was her long-standing interest in archaeology,

and latterly she had been working on the journeys of early peoples from Caithness to Orkney and studying the neolithic cairns and the geomorphology of the Orkneys,

especially

the

chambered

cairn

at

Quanternass.

In later years, she was sometimes anxious and depressed, not for herself, but for the future. She often said that two wars in a lifetime were too many.

She was totally opposed to nuclear weaponry, and was fearful that science would destroy, rather than enrich, mankind.

In old age, she watched many of her generation die: but with great generosity of spirit she visited and comforted many to the end. There were still livelier times in life. She gave, as her recreation in Who's Who, 'burning rubbish'.

In You May Well Ask (1979) she wrote: 'We go with the wave of our time, getting whatever is to be got out of

it. getting - and giving’. https://amzn.to/3G6dNOx

Naomi Margaret Mitchison, born November 1, 1897; died January 11, 1999, aged 101

“Naomi,” Jenni Calder (biographer) writes, “saw herself as an innovator, adventuring beyond accepted social and intellectual frontiers.” This was at the heart of her committed

feminism.

“Yet

she

valued

family

continuity, she valued a society founded on custom…

Did she contradict herself? Yes, of course. Consistency, like cautiousness, inhibits adventure. She did not like being cautious.”

Jenni Calder

“This is an excellent, understanding biography,

and continuously interesting. Read it and you will learn much about Scotland, much about the changing manners and morals of the 20th century; it’s an unexpectedly but enjoyable educational book.

Did Naomi spread herself too thinly? If you consider her primarily as a writer, the answer must be ‘yes’. On the other hand, not many write Allan Massie

novels as good as her two best ones, and not many who write novels of such quality also lead such a varied, and for the most part, useful life.”

Allan Massie

The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison

by Jenni Calder

https:// amzn.to/3mVu3tZ

Mathew Tekulsky has had a lifelong interest in nature and animals. He grew up in Larchmont, New York, and spent many years at summer camps in the Adirondack Mountains, climbing the High Peaks and exploring the wilderness.

He was a camper and counselor at Camp Pok-OMoonshine on Long Pond in Willsboro, and a counselor at Camp Lincoln on Augur Lake in Keeseville. During his time in the Adirondacks, Mathew climbed 33 of the 46 High Peaks, including Marcy, Colden, Giant, Whiteface, Algonquin, and Haystack.

His senior year thesis at Mamaroneck High School was on the “Forever Wild” clause for the Adirondack and Catskill parks, contained in Article XIV of the New York State Constitution, which was approved in 1894.

It begins: “The lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.”

Mathew received a B.A. from the University of Rochester in 1975 with a major in history and a minor in English literature. During his Junior Year Abroad at the University of Birmingham in England, he wrote a thesis on Aldous Huxley. During his senior year at the University of Rochester, he studied with novelist and short-story writer Jesse Hill Ford, who was a visiting professor of Southern literature.

Mathew’s first novel The Martin Luther King Mitzvah (Fitzroy Books, 2018) received the LitPick Top Choice book review award, for which you need to get two Five-Star reviews.

Mathew’s first Five-Star review stated, “The Martin Luther King Mitzvah was a great book to read. I have never read a book like it.” The second Five-Star review added, “The Martin Luther King Mitzvah by Mathew Tekulsky is a very captivating and enlightening book.”

Mathew Tekulsky’s novel Bernie and the Hermit was a finalist in the 2019 William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Mathew’s short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, including Adirondac, Jewish Spectator, Network Africa, Salome, and British Directory.

He was awarded Honorable Mention in the Short Story category of the 1984 Writer’s Digest Magazine writing competition. His short stories have been described as “very vivid and well-written” (Yale Review).

h t t p s : / / w w w. m a t h e w t e k u l s k y. c o m

THE ALAMO A Short Story by

M a t h e w Te k u l s k y In late April of 1986, I found myself between trains in New Orleans and since I had two hours to kill, I decided to take a taxi from the train station down to Jackson Square for coffee and beignets. It was muggy and overcast, but the temperature was pleasant enough and the coffee was hot and the beignets were sweet.

As I sat at my outdoor table in the early morning, gazing at the Mississippi River, I pondered about the conversation I had had with the cabbie on the ride from the station—or rather, the monologue that the cabbie had delivered to me.

“The niggers have taken over down here,” he had said. “They tell me where I can drive, how much I can make.”

I presumed that he was talking about the government bureaucrats in New Orleans who, much like the post office, must have included of a lot of black people. I thought about white guys like this cabbie, and I figured that from their point of view, their entire world had been turned upside down ever since the

Civil War. I finished my beignets and licked the sugar off of my fingers.

Then I took a walk around the French Quarter and eventually, I hailed another cab to take me back to the train station. And the same thing happened on my return trip. The cabbie, another middle-aged white guy, started telling me about how the “niggers” had taken over New Orleans.

I was never so glad to get out of a town as I was when the Sunset Limited pulled out of New Orleans and headed west across the Huey P. Long Bridge over the Mississippi River and

onward in the direction of Texas, where I knew that one of its stops would be in San Antonio, where the Alamo is located.

After crossing the bridge, the train moved through a succession of suburban areas and then the terrain finally opened up into agricultural fields that were interrupted by the occasional small town. A few hours after we left New Orleans, we pulled into Lafayette, and since it was half past noon, I decided to pay a visit to the dining car and have lunch.

At that moment, I saw a porter walk past my seat, so I gently tapped his arm and he stopped and looked down at me. He must be older than he looks, I thought, as are many black men. He had a wide face with warm eyes, and for a moment, I thought I was looking up at the great bluesman Muddy Waters. He was dressed in a navy blue vest over a white, long-sleeved shirt that was topped with a burgundy bow tie, and he had on navy blue slacks and black shoes. On his vest, he had a name tag that featured the Amtrak logo, under which was his name, printed out as “J. Williams.” I figured he was well into his fifties.

“Can I help you, sir?” he said.

“I was wondering,” I began, “where is the dining car?”

“I’ll take you there,” he answered, so I rose out of my seat and followed him down the length of the car. Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks and I almost ran into him. I

noticed that his path had been blocked by a young woman who must have just boarded the train, because she had a suitcase by her side.

“Boy,” she said to the porter, “put this away for me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the porter replied, without missing a beat.

He picked up her suitcase and placed it in the rack above the nearest empty seat. As he did this, I got a good look at the girl. She must have been about twenty-five, and she had long, wavy red hair and a freckled face. She wore

a blue jean jacket with a pink blouse under it, and she had on a tight pair of denims that matched her jacket. As soon as she spoke again, I realized that not only was she the spitting image of the actress Sissy Spacek, but she sounded just like Sissy Spacek as well.

“Now, boy,” she continued, looking at the porter, “where can I get a bite to eat around here? I’m dreadfully hungry.”

I thought the porter would explode (and I wouldn’t have blamed him for doing so), but he just kept his calm and he

simply said, “Follow me.”

So the porter went first, followed by Sissy Spacek, and then myself. The porter led us through another passenger car before we entered the dining car. The entire way, I looked at Sissy’s rear end swaying back and forth in those tight jeans and I wondered how the great gods of the South could have produced something so sublime and yet so nasty at the same time.

It seemed only natural that by the time we got to the dining

car, the porter would place us at the same table, and as he left us to our own designs, the porter gave me a proper stare before he went on his way, almost as a warning but not betraying any emotion or involvement on his part.

The green fields rolled by as I settled myself into my seat, but before I had a chance to get too comfortable, the redheaded girl reached out her hand to me across the table and she said, or rather, announced, “Victoria Pendergast, pleased to meet you.” I shook her hand and gave her my

name and then she said, “Well, now that we’ve been properly introduced, we’re practically best friends. You can call me Vicky.”

Of course, at that very moment, I couldn’t figure out why Vicky was being so friendly to me and yet so mean to the

Continued

porter, except for the obvious reason that she was a racist, but the package in which she was wrapped was so

On

appealing that I was willing to overlook this flaw in her

Page 44

character in order to spend some time in her company.

ULAN is the fourth book in the PATCH MAN series by Rick Stepp-Bolling .

Available via Amazon as a eBook, Paperback, or Hardcover.

UK https://amzn.to/3tBodSP USA https://www.amazon.com/ Ulan-Rick-Stepp-Bolling/ dp/1681607476/

A young Summian woman witnesses the murder of five Clan Hemite boys

by Imperial Panthers. Shamed that she could do nothing but watch this tragedy, she returns the boys’ ID tags only to discover Clan Hemite blames her for their deaths and she is now targeted in a blood reckoning. With the help of Bas, a former underground fighter, she flees her village.

Bas travels with Ulan to Sum-Est, home of the Lore Master, Ja, in hopes the young woman will benefit from the mystical training to become a Lore Mistress. But the Red Ward from Clan Hemite has vowed to fulfill the blood reckoning and follows Ulan’s trail to Sum-Est. Ulan undertakes the rigorous Lore training so she will be strong enough when she again meets the Imperial Panthers, but becomes sidetracked by the beautiful novice,

Tara

An excerpt from

ULAN

Ulan remembered the urgency in Bas’ voice when he hid her under the sand cover.

He had been afraid. Not for himself, but for her. She let her rage gradually dissipate. Grabbing her pack, she put it on her sore shoulders. “For now,” she said looking him in the eyes.

Bas tightened the straps on each shoulder. “I’ll explain later, but we have to hurry.

Never trust a member of the Panthers. They’ll be back.” Bas searched the horizon for what he knew would be coming shortly. “Drones or sleds,” he said pointing to shimmering objects in the distance. “We can’t stay above ground.” Taking his bacca from his leg sheath, he pressed a silver button. A high-pitched sound was released.

Watching the display panel, he held out the bacca while making a complete circle.

“There,” he said pointing to a position ahead of them. “It’s just starting, so we’ll have to run.” With a quick slice across her shoulders, the bacca cut through the straps and the pack fell to the ground. “Now run as though your life depended on it because it does!” Bas sprinted toward a rumbling noise building in intensity from somewhere beneath them.

Taking one look at the abandoned pack, Ulan broke into a run following him. Freed from the extra weight, she flew across the sand. If there was one thing she was gifted in, it was running. She took one glance over her shoulder just in time to see two sand sleds in the distance, but closing the gap between them all too quickly.

Bas raced to the edge of a darkening swirl of sand as it slowly circled and descended into a black pit. The rim of the eddy moved clockwise, sending anything caught in its vortex to the darkness below.

Ulan stopped when she saw the whirling sand. “A sand maelstrom!” she yelled. “We have to go around!”

Bas grabbed her arms. “There’s no time.” He pointed at the sleds rapidly approaching as they skimmed above the desert. “You’ll have to trust me, Ulan. Grab my shoulder straps and don’t let go.”

Ulan’s eyes widened, her mouth dropped open. “What are you going to do?” She started backing away from the edge of the maelstrom. “You’re going to jump into that . . . that . . . thing?”

Bas held her tightly. “It’ll be all right. You need to trust me. Now grab my shoulder straps.”

Sonic weapon fire lit up the sand around them.

“Those were warning shots,” Bas shouted. “Next come the kill shots.”

Well, if she were going to die, it wouldn’t be headless. She put her hands under his straps.

Bas grinned. “Hold on as tightly as you can. You might want to close your eyes.”

Ulan gripped the straps until she thought her hands might bleed.

She wondered what death by suffocation would be like.

The ALAMO Continued From Page 41

Besides, she was very entertaining and she had a bustling energy that was charming in its own way. Furthermore, when would I ever have a chance to hang out with a real Southern belle again? It wasn’t as if I were going back to New Orleans anytime soon.

So I gave Vicky the benefit of the doubt and I sat back and listened to her tell me stories about her childhood in New Orleans and all of the friends that she had. As she ate her catfish and I consumed my hamburger, Vicky related tales about being stuck in a magnolia tree at the age of sixteen and how the fireman kept his hands a little too long on her thighs; how her father chased after one of her high-school boyfriends with a shotgun and put a hole in the young man’s top hat; how she had sung the lead in “Anything Goes” during an amateur production of the musical; and how she had gone to hairdressing school and gotten her certificate.

“Honey,” she said, as she took a sip of coffee, “when you’re a young girl in the South, you’ve got to look good, you know what I mean? You can never be sure whom you’re going to meet, or what they might be able to do for you. That’s just the way it is. Sweetheart, are you listening to me?”

“Of course,” I answered, but I was busy trying to figure out how she could have treated the porter so badly and thought nothing of it. Since I didn’t want to confront her about this matter, I kept my mouth shut.

After lunch, Vicky and I made our way to the observation car, and we looked out at the swamps as we passed through Lake

Charles. A short while later, we crossed the border into Texas and we were met with vistas of low, rolling hills of desert scrubland. By the time we got to Beaumont in the late afternoon, the landscape had remained mostly flat but it became greener and we saw a few trees as well. During this part of the journey, the porter came through the observation car a few times, and he glared at Vicky on each occasion, but she took no notice of it, so wrapped up was she in the stories she was telling me about her life in the South.

It turned out that Vicky was traveling to Tucson to visit her

sister, who was opening up a beauty salon there. She wanted Vicky to join her, but Vicky wasn’t too sure about it.

“I’m used to my surroundings,” she said. “Have you ever seen the Alamo?” she went on. I said I hadn’t and she added, “The train stops at midnight in San Antonio, and we’ve got a couple of hours to kill. Want to see it?”

I nodded and I told Vicky that I needed to return to my seat and have a rest before dinner. We agreed to meet back in the dining car when the train stopped in Houston early that evening. Back in my seat, I closed my eyes and listened to the clacking of the train as it proceeded westward. I thought back to when I was a child and I had put on my coonskin cap and took out my toy six-gun and shot at the imaginary Mexican invaders as I defended the Alamo along with Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, both of whom I later learned had died there.

But that was the thing of it. There were no survivors at the Alamo, or so went the legend. They had all been slaughtered, fighting for their freedom. And now, Vicky had told me that we were going to visit that sacred battleground. I never thought I’d ever see the place.

The train rolled through Texas as the sun began to set, and a golden hue fell on the barren landscape. While I was gazing out at the sagebrush and the low, rolling hills, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and it was the porter.

“The young lady is waiting for you in the dining car,” he said.

I immediately raised my hands as if to importune the man, and I was about to make an exclamation of apology for spending even a minute of my time with Vicky, when the porter held out his own hand and, shaking mine, he said, “There’s no need.”

“Just one thing,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Jonas,” the porter answered, letting go of my hand.

“Thank you, Jonas,” I replied, and then Jonas led me through the next passenger car and into the dining car, as he had done earlier that day. Vicky was sitting in her usual seat and she beckoned for me to join her.

“Thank you, boy,” she said to Jonas, and he just gave her a cold look and went on his way. It was at this point that I was about to say something to Vicky, but she started talking first.

“You must have the Texas spare ribs,” she exclaimed. “They’re divine.”

Indeed, they were delicious, served with mashed potatoes and

green beans, along with salad and a roll. As I ate my dinner, I listened to Vicky tell me about her succession of boyfriends, from the Marine who wanted to be a poet, to the bootlegger who got shot after cheating the wrong redneck, to the drummer in a famous rock band, who had grown up with her in New Orleans and went on to conquer the world. Alas, none of them turned out to be Mr. Right, and poor Vicky had never been married.

“Sweetheart, I’m going to die an old maid,” she told me, as the waiter brought us our pecan pie and coffee. By now, the sun had set and

the landscape was faintly visible in the darkness. I pressed my head against the window to get a better look at the scenery.

“Yes, indeed,” Vicky went on, “I’m going to die an old maid. Mark my words, honey.”

I looked back from the window and directed my gaze at Vicky.

“I hardly think so, darling,” I said. “You mark my words.”

Now, it takes five hours for the train to travel from Houston to San Antonio. Vicky and I continued our conversation in the dining car

until it closed at nine-thirty, and then we returned to the observation car, where, instead of sitting in the chairs, we sat on the floor with our backs against the wall near one of the doors. Out of people’s way, we caused no trouble, and Jonas knew this, so all he could do as he walked back and forth on his rounds was to glare at Vicky and give me a stern look, as if he were warning me about some trouble to come.

Vicky’s life had been difficult. She lost her father when she was nineteen, and she had been abused by her uncle. It seems as if none of the males in New Orleans had been able to keep their hands off of her, poor girl. As time went by, I began to feel sleepy, and I noticed that Vicky’s storytelling became a little slower as well. Finally, she put her head on my shoulder and she nodded off. I guess she talked herself to sleep. I used this opportunity to catch a few winks myself.

When I awoke, I checked my watch and I saw that it was eleven o’clock, which meant that we were only an hour away from San Antonio. Vicky pulled her head off of my shoulder and she brushed her hair back with her hands.

“Honey,” she said, “that was the best nap I ever had. You have a good shoulder.”

“Not bad for a Yankee,” I said, and she laughed at my joke.

Since the dining car was closed, we went down to the snack bar on the lower level of the observation car. Here, we had coffee and pizza, and I pressed my face against the window and observed the full moon that was already high in the sky. After a while, we pulled into the station in San Antonio. As the train came to a stop, Vicky took hold of my arm and she led me to the door, where Jonas was ready to guide people on and off of the train.

“Boy,” Vicky said to Jonas, “where can we get a taxi?”

“Just go through the station,” Jonas answered.

I took a quick look at Jonas as I left the train, and he still had a glare on his face. I was sure he would just as soon never see Victoria Pendergast again, but I was on my way to the Alamo and I didn’t have time to analyze the situation any further. As we got onto the platform, I looked up and I took in a view of the full moon.

Vicky and I walked through the station and out onto the street, where

a few cabs were waiting for fares. She still had her hand on my arm,

and it felt good. A Latina cabbie who looked to be in her thirties stood in front of an early model Chevrolet, and Vicky chose this person to take us to the Alamo. Her name was Rosie, and before she drove us to Alamo Plaza, she insisted on giving us a tour of downtown San Antonio, including a visit to the River Walk, where Vicky and I strolled in the moonlight all by ourselves. After that, Rosie took us over to Alamo Plaza and she parked the car. I could see the façade of the Alamo chapel from across the plaza, and Vicky grabbed my hand and led me over to the church while Rosie waited for us. The first thing I noticed was that the Alamo was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, but it was far more beautiful than I had expected as well.

The façade was lit up by some spotlights, so it shone white against the black sky. Meanwhile, the moonlight added a solemn aura to the scene. It was hard to believe that right where I was standing, Davy Crockett and the Tennessee Volunteers had battled Santa Anna’s army, to no avail. Jim Bowie had died here too, as had around two hundred other men. Vicky pressed my arm and she said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” I could only agree, and looking to the left of the chapel, I noticed the Texas flag flying from the top of a well-lit flagpole.

Vicky and I lay down on the grass and we looked up at the moon. The temperature was a little chilly, but it was peaceful lying there with Vicky and thinking about all of the brave Texans who had given their lives for freedom on this very spot.

Vicky took my hand in hers and she said, “Do you think I should move to Tucson?”

“I think it might be good for you,” I replied, and that’s as close as I came to confronting Vicky’s racism on that journey.

We got up off of the grass and took another look at the chapel, which appeared so calm at night. Then I looked down at my watch and I noticed that it was two-thirty, which meant that we only had fifteen minutes to make it back to our train.

Fortunately, the station was only a short drive away, so we rushed back to the taxi and Rosie took us over to the station.

However, as soon as we walked through the station and

entered the platform, we were shocked to see that the train

was already starting to move! I spotted the door to our car and I saw Jonas standing there with that familiar glare on his face. I turned to Vicky and I shouted, “Hurry up,” and I bolted for the train. Just then, she shouted out at me, “My purse! I left it in the cab!” She turned and ran back toward the station as I continued running toward the slowly moving train.

“Stop the train!” I shouted at Jonas, but he just stared back at me and said nothing. I jumped onto the step of the car and held onto the railing as the train gathered speed. I turned my head just in time to see Rosie emerge from the station and give Vicky her

purse, but by then, the train was moving too fast for Vicky to catch up with it. The last I saw of Vicky, she was jumping up and down on that platform, shouting, “Stop the train! Stop the train!

You dumb nigger!”

But it was no use. Jonas pulled me up the steps and into the train. I just looked at him in disbelief as the train speeded on into the night.

Inspired by the reclusive writer and activist, Gladys McKinley, and horrified by the religious and racial divisions of their suburban town, Adam and Sally organize a kids’ march to protest the Vietnam War. In the heady weeks that follow, the two are featured in a local newspaper, interviewed on the radio, and meet the charismatic Martin Luther King who is shaping the civil rights movement of their day.

As his bar mitzvah approaches, Adam must grapple with newfound notions of race and religion, of division and unity, of peace and war. The Martin Luther King Mitzvah tells the timeless story of two kids who defy the odds, unite a town, and make a brave stand against discrimination

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How to find your next great read, AND your next favorite author.

Electric Eclectic books are written by some of the best indie authors in the world.

These Electric Eclectic anthologies introduce you to many of our authors, allow ingv you to sample a whole range of dynamic genres and writing styles before committing to buy a book written by any of our authors.

It’s a little like 'Tinder' for book lovers!

Available on Amazon, just click the links below.

Moth Balls h tt p s : / / a m z n . t o / 3 4 K M Z p 3 Butterfly Bats h tt p s : / / a m z n . t o / 3 I 4 Q y V r

Mayfly Recitals h tt p s : / / a m z n . t o / 3 K d X U I 4

My last wish `Note: ` Feg`, is rough grass.`

Scatter me gently, then let me lie, There in the heather, under the sky, Leave me no headstone, save that in your heart, Keep only the love, that I did impart.

Let me go softly, let me be free, No grave with confines, that`s not for me, Give me the feg, and the fern for my bed, And the peaty fresh smell to sweeten my head.

Scatter me gently, where fast winds do blow, Where skylarks sing softly, and bilberries grow, Then leave me there, that is where I belong, Under God`s heaven, hearing his song.

Let me go softly, then do not grieve, This is my wish, this is what I believe, Let me lie there at peace in my rest, There on `the common`, the place I love best.

Anon

Outsized (A4) Glossy Illustrated Full Colour Hardcover

The Rabbit Joke the story tells of one brave and heroic rabbit, Fluffybunny, who ventures out, into the scary, dangerous world, to save his warren from starvation during a bleak, harsh winter.

It is a tale which can be read, in whole or part, at bedtime, or during quiet periods.

The Rabbit Joke is a 'Read to Me' book, Designed to be read aloud by parents to their children, or by a competent reader to younger children, or siblings.

The Rabbit Joke is an outsized (A4), hardcover, glossy, full colour, illustrated, perfect bound book which has received several commendations and excellent reviews, not least from Richard Dodd, the well-known author of children's titles such as 'Fluffy Hugs' and 'The Secret Passageway.'

The Rabbit Joke is not on Amazon.

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The Power of Reading on Children an Electric Press report

There can be few things as powerful as regularly reading to a young child.

It has astonishing benefits for children: comfort and reassurance, confidence and security, relaxation, happiness and fun. Giving a child time and full attention when reading them a story tells them they matter. It builds self-esteem, vocabulary, feeds imagination and even improves their sleeping patterns. Yet fewer than half of 0–2year-olds are read to every day or nearly every day by their parents.

Statistics from 2014 show that one in five children in England cannot read well by the age of 11.

Further research, conducted in 2015, found that similar percentages of 15-year-olds across the UK do not have a minimum level of literacy proficiency: 18% in England and Scotland, 15% in Northern Ireland and 21% in Wales.

Students are less able to learn other curricula if they do not develop

sufficient reading skills by the middle of primary school. OECD (2016), Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): Results from PISA 2015, United Kingdom Only 35% of 10-year-olds in England report they like reading 'very much'. This lags behind countries like Russia (46%), Ireland (46%), New Zealand (44%), and Australia (43%).

By the final year of compulsory schooling in England, the reading skills of children from disadvantaged backgrounds are on average almost three years behind those from the most affluent homes.

Proven power of reading Reading for pleasure is more important for children's cognitive development than their parents' level of education and is a more powerful factor in life achievement than socioeconomic background.

16-year-olds who choose to read books for pleasure outside of school are more likely to secure managerial or professional jobs in later life.

Having books in the home is associated with both reading enjoyment and confidence.

Of children who report having fewer than 10 books in their homes, 42% say they do not like reading and only 32% say they are 'very confident' readers.

For children who report having over 200 books at home, only 12% say they do not like reading and 73% consider themselves 'very confident' readers.

Children who read books often at age 10, and more than once a week at age 16, gain higher results in maths, vocabulary and spelling tests at age 16 than those who read less regularly.

Sullivan and Brown (2013) Social inequalities in cognitive scores at age 16

The role of reading.

The benefits of reading aloud to your child go far beyond childhood and school life! It’s been discovered that reading aloud to your little one for 20 minutes a day can increase their lifetime earnings by £500,000.

This shows reading aloud has significant benefits that last right through to adulthood and can impact their ability to start a successful career.

World Literacy Foundation (2015) The Economic and Social Cost of Illiteracy

Introducing

Alexia Kanta Alexia Kanta

was just 8 years old when she illustrated and wrote the stories for her first

book “Welcome to Yoota, Land of the Katers”. Her book won an honourable mention in 2021.

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Now, at the age of 10, still loving art, Alexia is creating her illustrations digitally. Her second book, The CupCake Cats Visit Yoota, has wonderful new characters, and includes you’re favourite Katers from book one. Join the CupCake Cats and Kittens and the adventures they have with the Katers.

Welcome to Yoota land of the Katers and The Cupcake Cats Visit Yoota are available free on Kindle Unlimited.

Alexia keeps the cost low so all parents can afford to buy these books for their children. eBook

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When FRANCE banned books and closed bookstores

On 13 January 1535 a statute was enacted in France, forbidding all printing under threat of hanging, and closing all bookshops.

By 1518 the event was to set all Europe at loggerheads, and to render problematical all aspects of national and international discourse was already underway, as the works of Martin Luther began to circulate.

In 1521, Francis I of France decreed all books must to be read and approved by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris. Parliament ordered all

Lutheran books must be deposited within one week.

In 1526, the Parliament of Paris and the Sorbonne issued a ban on the publishing of the Bible in French.

In 1535, with the ban on printing and closure of bookshops, a list was published of suspected Lutheranists to be banished from the kingdom without trial.

Among these was the poet, Clement Marot Since 1519 Marot was protege of the king’s sister, Margaret of Angouleme, already known for her reformist

sympathies.

He escaped the authorities, first to her court at Navarre, and then to Ferrara. But officers were sent to his home in Blois, and his books and papers seized.

In an exile’s edition of his “Adolescence Clementine,” his enormously successful collection of poems first published in 1532, he inserted a new poem addressed to Francis I, “Epistre au Roy, du temps de son exil a Ferrare,” is an appeal for clemency, an ideal to which his name is

symbolically connected, and a statement of his poetics.

Central to these poetics are two conjoined ideas: the right of the individual to privacy, and the responsibility of poets to wade in dangerous waters.

Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

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A f a s t p a c e d c r i m e d r a m a f r o m t h e a u t h o r, P a u l W h i t e , An Electric Eclectic book You can walk away from a lot of things in your life. Leave them behind you. Forget about them, move on and hope they never come back and bite you on the arse.

But some things are impossible to walk away from. Usually, these are your own fuck-ups, the

foolish, stupid mistakes you make, the bad decisions… and guess what? You generally make these when you are angry, down or drunk.

The latest mistake I made was when I was angry; angry at myself for being in a state of selfloathing, a morbid depression. So, I had a drink or two, or three, or four. I am not sure how many because I lost count early in the evening and it turned out to be a long, long night.

A very long night.

By the morning it was too late. I had fucked-up big time. Now I had to do something every fibre in my soul told me was wrong.

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Letters to

C h r i s t o p h e r To l k i e n

On 8 January 1913, J. R. R. Tolkien and Edith Bratt got engaged.

Their relationship inspired the story of Beren and Luthien, one of the great tales of Middle-earth.

On the 11th of July, 1973, in a letter* to his son, Tolkien lamented that, “…unlike the story, he couldn't beg for her life in front of Mandos.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 - 1973) served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959.

He is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. * THE LETTERS OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN, GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, Letter no 340

11 July 1972 I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave. .... The inscription I should like is: EDITH MARY TOLKIEN 1889-1971 Lúthien Brief and jejune, except for Lúthien, which says for me more than a

multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.1

J R R TOLKIEN

EDITH MARY TOLKIEN Nee - BRATT

July 13th

Say what you feel, without reservation, about this addition. I began this under the stress of great emotion & regret – and in any case I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement.

I need advice. Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy.

She knew the earliest form of the legend (written in hospital), and also the poem eventually printed as Aragorn's song in Lord of the Rings.

1

It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that, in time, became the chief pan of the Silmarillion.

It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while).

In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance.

But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.

I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths — someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives — and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love.

For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.

15 July I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead.

A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and bookstores of Allen & Unwin.

To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the main business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Dispatch) was dealing with my works.

I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from boardroom downwards.

'Accountancy' told me that the sales of The Hobbit were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights.

Also, a large single order for copies of The L.R. [Lord of the Rings] had just come in.

When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected, I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for The L.R. was for 6,000.

The tale of Beren and Lúthien

Was, or became, an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion,

the

myths

and

legends of the First Age of the World

conceived

by

J.R.R.

Tolkien.

Returning from France and the battle of the Somme at the end of 1916, he wrote the tale in the following year.

Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren

and Lúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril.

In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.

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h t tps ://bi t .l y/ Icon icA r tis ts

A LIFE IN A DAY a s h ort s tory from

Chris A Hunt Over the world the sunlight streams But what has become of Jock o’ Dreams?

Jock o’ Dreams, Rose Fyleman

He stared down at his beige hiking boots and wondered why they were that colour.

The hot sun struck his exposed arms with a physical force; skin prickling under the impact of the rays. A soft breeze sighed down from the sweeping downs behind him. Warm and fragrant with summer scents, it carried with it the murmured songs of busy,

industrious insects, and the rise and fall melody of a high and distant lark singing just for fun.

He twisted around and looked over his shoulder. Beyond the fields the downs climbed steeply upwards towards a cloudless sky, the lower flanks of the hills carpeted with hard-bright rapeseed flowers swaying in undulating unison in the breeze. Above the yellow seas the downlands merged to a blue-green pine forest, dense and heavily shadowed even in the bright sunshine.

He stood up and looked down the little lane. The grey-black tarmac

twisted and turned between the grassy banks, lost from view only a few hundred metres away amongst the lush hedgerows and tall oaks. He could not remember which direction he was travelling in or which direction he had come from. He turned completely round.

The lane in the opposite direction however, looked disturbingly odd; the colours of the trees and the grass banks seemed to have leached back into the soil, the vista somehow faded and drab. In that direction the countryside looked like early winter despite the heavy leafiness of the trees. The sky was a deathly grey and the

tarmac old and worn out. He turned around again and looked the

other way. The easy fullness of a high summer’s day surged towards him, the tumbling colours so much brighter and denser compared to the deathly dull winters day he now knew lay incongruously over his shoulder. He swivelled round and faced the winter with the intention of taking a few steps towards it but stopped suddenly, his mind prickling uncomfortably. Unease rose from some hidden reservoir as icy tendrils entered his head. He backed off. The feelings diminished rapidly with every backwards step but the scene before him remained unchanged, pale and lack-lustre. He stepped forward, more for experiment than anything else. Something from deep within himself told him plainly - he didn’t need to go that way, indeed that he must not go that way ever. One more step forward and the prickling returned immediately, unease rose again, this time marbled with strands of fear. He twisted round and began to walk towards summer, only occasionally glancing back at the pseudoDecember day slowly being left behind him. The leafy lane meandered on, the scene either side changing little, flat fields on his left, the downs on his right, the sun shining from a clear uninhabited sky, he walked without thinking, happy to be in summer, happy to be relaxed and warm, happy to be here.

Happy to be where, though? The thought struck him forcibly. He stopped and sat down on the bank in the shade. Where was he?

Who was he? He suddenly became aware he had no answers to these questions or indeed any others; in fact, he didn’t seem to know anything at all. He didn’t know where he’d come from, where he was going, he didn’t know how old he was or even his own name.

It was obvious something had gone catastrophically wrong in his head. He would have to get help. He stood, looking warily down the

way from which he had come. The sad December day was still there; there was no going back the way he’d come, something in his head told him there was nothing good to be found behind him. Danger, perhaps even something inherently evil lurked in the winter world back down the lane, and he didn’t want to find out what.

There must be someone about, on a tractor maybe, working the fields, other people hiking, taking in the sights and sounds of a beautiful summer’s day. There must be houses somewhere ahead, a village even. He walked on and thought about his lack of thought

and but knew, somehow, he would be safe.

He saw the country pub through the trees, away off to his right.

Steeply sloping roof and toothpaste-white walls criss-crossed with black timber beams, glimpsed hesitantly between the gently swaying branches and foliage. The lane wandered about and around for a mile or more before eventually he stood in the car park, running his eyes over the ancient building.

There were only a couple of cars, loosely parked, but the front door was wide open, the place was open for business. Without further hesitation, he strode into the saloon bar.

He blinked rapidly in the unexpectedly dim interior until his eyes

acclimatised themselves to the light. The landlord was sitting on a stool further down the bar reading a folded newspaper.

Despite the cars outside there didn’t appear to be anybody else in the bar. The landlord stood and carefully set aside the paper, switched on his smile and asked him, “What can I get you, sir?”

He looked at the hand pumps on the bar and somehow instinctively knew what beer he wanted; he knew what he liked and what he didn’t. Without thinking, he ordered a pint of bitter and he reached into his pocket, took out some coins and paid the landlord, receiving his change without so much as a nod from him. “The menu’s on the bar, just there,” said the landlord hopefully, pointing at the pile of red plastic covers. “All homemade, you know.” He sauntered back down the counter and with a soft grunt sat back on the stool and picked up his paper again.

Sipping his beer, he remembered he couldn’t remember and opened his mouth to say something to the landlord. He shut his mouth again when he realised he didn’t actually know what to say. Taking the pint, he crossed the bar and sat down at a bay window table. ‘Oh well’, he thought, ‘It can wait; it’ll all come back to me, sooner or later’. And he stared out of the open window at the lovely day, sipping cool beer and thinking of nothing at all.

She kneaded gritty eyes, switched off the monitor, and stared momentarily back at her reflection on the dark, blank screen.

She felt tired, and with good cause. Christ what a life! All work and no play.

Pulling her cardigan from the chair-back, she draped it loosely around her shoulders and went downstairs to the staff canteen.

She drew a beaker of black coffee from the dispenser and looked around for a vacant table. She saw that Clare sat by the sleetsplattered windows, threading her way through the tables she sat down heavily opposite her friend. Clare glanced up from her magazine. She noted her friend’s hollow, baggy eyes. “You’re looking good, Jo.” Clare smiled broadly. “Anyone I ought to know?”

She winked exaggeratedly.

“No such luck, Clare.” Jo sipped some coffee. “I’m still having that

bloody dream again. The same one, over and over again. It’s beginning to drive me nuts, the scene just keeps repeating itself, never changing.” She sipped more coffee. “It’s like someone has looped a video together and is playing it constantly in my mind usually the very instant I go to sleep.”

Clare looking closely at her friend, she certainly did look rough.

“Perhaps you ought to go and see the Doc? Get some pills or something, sleeping pills maybe. Now my mother had some little blue ones...” Jo didn’t bother listening after that; Clare could roll off at various tangents for the rest of the afternoon and never cover the same subject twice.

She had a point, though. Maybe she ought to see a doctor. Her health, both mentally and physically, was beginning to suffer because of her constant night time waking - and the absence of real quality sleep when eventually she did drift off. Anyway, she was sick to death of dreaming every single night of an unknown man walking along a country lane to pub she’d never seen.

... He saw the country pub through the trees, away off to his right.

Steeply sloping roof and toothpaste-white walls criss-crossed with black timber beams, glimpsed hesitantly between the gently swaying branches and foliage. There were two cars parked in the car park.

He stepped into the empty bar and headed straight to the counter. The landlord, sitting on his barstool was reading his paper again.

“Hello again landlord,” he said cheerfully. The landlord looked up

from the paper, switched on his smile again and asked him, “What

can I get you, sir?”

“I’ll have the same as yesterday, please, thank you”.

“Yesterday? Hmm... err... which beer did you want?”

Puzzled, he pointed at a hand-pump. “That one, same as yesterday.”

The landlord frowned and began to pull the pint.

“I came in yesterday, you don’t remember?”

“Can’t say that I do. To be honest with you, we see a lot of people through the pub; you know tourists and the like. Summer’s always a busy time.

The menu’s on the bar, just there. All home-made, you know.” He

sauntered back down the bar and with soft grunt sat back on the stool and picked up his paper again.

He stared at the landlord, there was nobody in the pub yesterday and there’s nobody in the bar now, how could he forget? Sitting in the bay window again, he thought to himself, ‘Never mind how the landlord forgot. I remember coming into the bar, but I still can’t remember much else’.

He sipped his beer, sitting in the warm sunlight, and stared out of the window.

“Yesterday?” asked the landlord.

“Jeez! I came in yesterday, and the day before, we had this same conversation yesterday. You didn’t remember me then either”.

The landlord repeated his previous day’s conversation. Didn’t he say those exact words yesterday?

Puzzled, he picked up his pint and sat in the sun-lit bay window. ‘But I remember yesterday’, he thought. ‘I walked along the lane, I came into

the pub, I did exactly the same thing the day before.’ But what was seriously worrying him now was he simply could not recall one solitary scrap of detail before walking down the lane or after he collected his pint.

Where did he go after he left the pub and why couldn’t he remember?

He sipped his beer and stared out of the window. ...He stared down at his beige hiking boots and wondered why they were that colour.

He stood up. ‘Why do I think that every day?’ he thought, a frown

creasing his forehead, and why does every day seem the same, not just

the same lane, the same weather, the same circumstances, but the same day?

He felt as though he was waking from a deep, dreamless sleep. Yet he knew he’d been sitting on the bank, the grass was flattened; only the seat of his jeans was slightly damp nothing else, so he knew he hadn’t fallen asleep there. He looked at the sun, it was probably heading for mid-day. Where had he been? Where did he go every night? Every day was the same. He’d walk along this pleasant lane with bright summer before him and dull winter behind, and go into the pub.

Every day he asked the landlord if he remembered him, every day the landlord said the same, identical thing. He had money in his pocket and bought a pint but no food. Every day he would ‘wake’ from this verdant bank and start walking towards the pub.

The only difference was that now he clearly remembered the days gone by.

Now the memories were beginning to accumulate.

“How long has it been going on?” The doctor looked at her over the top of his half-round spectacles.

“Two months at least.”

“And it is always that same dream?”

“It was at first, yes.”

“Now it’s changed?”

Jo looked levelly back at her doctor. “No, he’s different”.

“He’s different?”

She hesitated for a moment, and glanced uncertainly around the room and thought very carefully before she replied.

“The man, in the dream, the man is...” She paused and looked a little helpless and shrugged. “The man is acquiring memories; he’s remembering the events of the previous dream. He recalls what the landlord says, and what he says in return. In fact, I’ll go so far and say that he’s actually becoming aware of the circumstances.” She waited for the doctor’s reaction to that. He didn’t react, she carried on, “And in fact he’s got to the point where he’s getting very frustrated. He thinks he is going mad.”

The doctor had reacted but it didn’t show. Within his head alarm bells began to clatter. Recurrent dreams were a nuisance, nightmares perhaps symptoms of deeper disturbances, but when people in dreams begin to remember themselves and assume the solidity of reality then trouble lay ahead. He began writing on a pad.

“The first thing we’ve got to do is make sure you get a good night’s sleep. Sleep is the body’s way of repair and recuperation from the hurly-burly of life.” He handed her the prescription. “Take this to the chemist. Take one tablet before bedtime. Come back and see me in a week and we’ll see what a few days of good restful sleep can do.”

Jo stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and noted the bags under her eyes, and the lacework of fine but discernible wrinkles.

She looked and felt tired, her body ached and her limbs felt leaden.

She popped the pill and headed for bed.

He found himself staring at his boots, but this time he knew something was different; something was wrong, quite wrong in fact. His boots looked grey, his jeans did too. He stared at his

hands; they looked like the hands of a long dead corpse. He jumped to his feet, the downlands and the once startlingly bright fields of rapeseed were now dull and dingy, the summit of the downs indistinct and clouded as if obscured by January hoar frosts and clammy mists. He raised his head and stared at the gunmetal sombre sky, cloudless and colourless. There was no sun, just a skyscape of universal grey.

He began to run down the lane towards the pub, but the lane

became ever darker the further he ran. He thought at first it was the trees shielding what little light descended from above, but it was the light itself that was fading. His beautiful, peaceful little world was dying, and he knew he was dying too. His breath became more and more ragged, energy faded from his limbs; tears fell from his eyes. He sat on a near-black grassy bank and stared at his hands. With a shock he realised they were as indistinct as the downland summits. After just a few minutes he lost sight of his feet and his legs, too. The grassy bank around him slowly dissolved before his eyes, the trees above blended and merged into the murky, troubled sky.

As his vision faded to black, he thought one last poignant thought.

That he would have liked to have lived longer than just one single day.

Jo slept, deep and dreamless.

In another county, Allan pulled his truck into an unlit country lay-by.

The vehicle stopped in a swirl of diesel fumes and crunching gravel, air brakes hissing sharply as truck and trailer swayed gently to a stop.

He leant back against the headrest feeling terrible. The sudden headache that had pierced his brain rose to a new height; his hands shook uncontrollably. Deep inside him he felt a weird void forming, a vast hollowness as if gravity was tugging at his very soul and pouring it away from him like water through a sieve. He switched on the lights of the cab and stared at his shaking hands. Looking at his pale-grey skin, he was convinced he was having a heart attack, although some part of him tried to rationalise that at the age of twenty-six it seemed unlikely.

He leant his head back against the headrest as more uncontrollable tremors and spasms wracked his body and he arched his back in pain.

His breath squeezed itself through tightly clamped jaws, each breath an effort, each effort a pain, each desperate lungful of air gained only at enormous cost. Convinced more than ever he was having some kind of attack or seizure, he fumbled blindly with the door handle and swung open the heavy door. He tried to key numbers into his mobile phone with ever more violently shaking fingers until he lost the battle for grip and the phone dropped into the floor-well.

He fell out of the cab; falling ungainly and uncontrolled he landed badly on the ground, knocking out what little breath remained in his lungs. He lay still, trying desperately to draw air in, but his body refused to acknowledge he was alive. With a huge effort he forced himself upright and sat with his back against the massive front wheel of the truck. Still not breathing properly, with a shock saw he could no longer make out his hands; they’d become hazy and tenuous, almost transparent. In panic, he tried to cry out for help but it was a futile waste of effort in an empty lay-bay, on a country lane at midnight.

His sight dimmed, losing focus, all nearby objects lost colour, began to disappear from his view. Allan knew he was dying; he just didn’t know why. Strangely, one over-riding thought, one vision, a clear brightcolour image kept returning again and again to his rapidly collapsing

mind.

A scene full of life and colour.

A recollection of him walking. Walking along a meandering country lane last year, heading to his local pub for a Sunday lunchtime pint in the bright, comfortable heat of high summer.

But before very long that beautiful scene lost definition and it faded to black.

The police patrol car drove slowly into the lay-by, splashing through the rime-edged brown puddles, bumping over the

mushy ruts dusted with murky ice crystals. It was early morning and the freezing fog clung lazily to the earthy banks of the layby. It shifted and drifted listlessly between the dripping trees bordering the freshly ploughed field. The distant murmur of the motorway droned even and constant, and off over the bleak fields somewhere a bird called.

The Officer looked all around the vehicle, its door wide open, blazing headlights on, powerful engine ticking over, the lights glowing softly inside the cab. The load was untouched, the

vehicle intact, a phone on the floor by the pedals, no accident damage, and no sign of hijack. He called it in.

They searched for Allan, all over the lay-by and the surrounding fields and ditches, along the country road, the hard shoulders and embankments of the nearby motorway. They knocked and enquired at nearby houses and searched the local barns and outbuildings, but they didn’t find a trace of him, no driver, no text message for help on the powered-up phone, not even a single footprint left imprinted in the cold mud below the truck’s open door.

There was nothing at all to show that Allen had got out of the cab.

Chris A Hunt

Chris is a retired Sales Engineer.

Having travelled over all of Southern England for over 40 years he doesn’t know much about any town his ever visited... only the factories, warehouses, military bases and such places that reside in therein.

He is an established author, with forty-nine unpublished short stories completed, a number of stories published in several anthologies. A full-length sci-fi novel completed and 50% of

the way through a second. He has co-written anthology of Sci -Fi and Fantasy stories, Temporal Paradoxes which features on my website http://www.writers2.co.uk .

Chris is married to Jan, now nearly 46 years and they have one daughter, Zöe who is a First Officer Pilot with British Airways, flying her 777 to long haul to destinations all over the planet. She in turn is married to Graeme, an ex-Royal

Marine with two tours of Afghanistan under his belt. Two

grandchildren of 1½ and 2½ keep us busy...

Chris was a Founder, and Chairman of a very successful writing group, which produced several published authors.

He was also Chair of the Kent Wing of the Air Cadets.

Interested in anything interesting.... including matters of science fiction, reading, writing and artwork, engineering and science matters from steam engines to spacecraft, bugs to biology, history, computer technologies and even gardening. He is well-travelled, most of the countries in Europe, Scandinavia, plus Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, a few Caribbean islands, amongst others.

Other interests include real ale(!), 60’s music, motor racing and cricket, walking for fun and archaeology, of which Chris visited many sites, both home and foreign, He says “I have a clinical disinterest in politics and religion, of any flavour.”

This anthology, by Chris A Hunt & Barry

Ireland, consists of twenty-eight short of science fiction, fantasy, the supernatural, and good old-fashioned magic.

Some

are

deadly

serious,

some

deadly

humorous, and others both, or neither.

A rollercoaster journey through way-out witchcraft, saucy sorcery, alchemy of ghosts, vampires, apocalyptical

sentient planets,

machines, and

and

high-tech

weaponry in bizarre and incredible arenas.

https://amzn.to/3AeOc3z

Below Torrential Hill, by Jonathan Koven, is a worthy winner of the Electric Eclectic Novella Fiction Prize 2021.

This is a review by Anthony Avina, author, journalist, and blogger, on December 28, 2021.

https://authoranthonyavinablog.com

T h e Syn op si s It’s Christmas, and strange occurrences are plaguing the small town of Torrential Hill: a supernatural comet, undead insects, exploding streetlights, and a presence luring people into the woods. But when the mother of Tristen—a wistful, fatherless sixteen-year-old boy—hears voices from the

kitchen sink, all he can think of is running away.

The Review This was such a moving and powerful coming-of-age story! The author did such an incredible job of crafting relatable and emotional characters for readers to become invested in while layering their narratives to get a much better understanding of everyone’s motivations and struggles, especially protagonist Tristen. The balance of the author’s genres between magical realism and literary fiction felt absolutely seamless and natural, allowing the reader to become invested in the character’s arcs while still exploring the world the author had created.

What really stood out to me was the incredible way the author matched the atmosphere and setting to the protagonist’s journey, almost as if the character’s

surroundings became a reflection of their own inner turmoil and the ups and downs they went through. I also was really impressed with the fine line the narrative played with magical realism, as it allowed enough room for the reader to kind of draw their own conclusions from this aspect of the story, and kind of put a whole-new modernday, coming-of-age twist on the classic Christmas Carol narrative.

T h e Ve r d i c t Heartfelt, thought-provoking, and mesmerizing, author Jonathan Koven’s “Below Torrential Hill” is a must-read short story/literary fiction read with a hint of magical realism. The connection readers feel to the main character is immediate, and the exploration of themes like our innate need for love, family, and dealing with loss all come together in a very heartening way. With a writing style that leans towards imagery and artistry, readers will be hard-pressed not to grab their own copy of this amazing read, so be sure to do so today!

Below Torrential Hill Amazon UK https://amzn.to/3FSKZrW Amazon USA https://www.amazon.com/Below -Torrential-Hill-Electric-Eclecticebook/dp/B09LZNVW16

Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the

free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

Ben Okri

Photo by Eberhard Grossgasteiger/Pexels